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The history of HTML

HTML is a web development language used to define the content of your web pages. CSS on the other hand is used to arrange the content, design the layout and adjust the presentation: color, background image, margins, text size, etc.

But not all HTML versions are created equal.

Over time, the HTML and CSS languages have been rather significantly improved. In the first version of HTML (HTML 1.0), you couldn’t even properly display images, whereas today anything from a background image to a gradient is a piece of cake for HTML5 and CSS3.

Here’s a very brief background of the different versions of HTML.

HTML 1: the first version of HTML was created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, it was very basic and couldn’t even display images.

HTML 2: the second version of HTML appeared in 1994. This was the version that laid the groundwork for the future versions of HTML. Many new features were implemented in this versions, most of which are still used today!

HTML 3: the third version of HTML appeared in 1996. This new version of HTML added many possibilities to the language such as tables, applets, scripts, positioning of text around images and more. Some of these features have since then been depreciated, but most are still used in modern web development.

HTML 4: the fourth and most common version of HTML appeared for the first time in 1998, and proposed the use of frames (which divided a web page into several parts), more complex markup, improved forms and tables and so on. More importantly, this was the first version to allow the use of CSS styles directly embedded within the HTML code.

HTML 5: the fifth version of HTML is the infamous HTML5. HTML5 offers many improvements such as the ability to include audio and video players easily, a better layout for content, new form options, etc. This is the version that most people want to learn more about.

This introduction to the history of HTML was partially taken from the SiteRaw tutorial (check it out).